Though without easy or pat explanations, Bauer’s world is rich in the often wrong-headed but always well-meaning choices her...
A spare, demanding addition to the burgeoning genre that traces how a “problem” child destroys his well-meaning parents’ lives together.
Around age four, Edward stops talking and, except for occasional brief relapses into near normalcy, shows many symptoms of autism, although the specialists decide he is not specifically autistic. Edward’s mother, Rachel, and father, Jack, are distraught. Jack folds his failing construction business and the family moves back to Minneapolis, where Rachel’s parents live. Jack takes a job as a cop, and Rachel works part-time for a newspaper. Their younger son, Matt, shows signs of great intelligence, but Edward remains mute and painfully sleepless. Then, during a tonsillectomy, he sleeps while he’s anaesthetized and later is given codeine. Finally rested, he begins to behave more normally, but once the codeine wears off, he reverts to his usual zombie state. Desperate to find a way to help him sleep, Rachel persuades Jack to procure some marijuana, which they serve Edward as tea, but, when it doesn’t work, they stop. Their third child, Grace, is born around the same time that Rachel discovers that melatonin may help Edward sleep. Edward learns to write, and, just when their lives seem on track, Jack is fired for having bought the marijuana for Edward. After disappearing on a binge, he returns to take a job as a bank guard, and family life gets back on track. Jack proves himself gifted at working with Edward, and all the children thrive. But Edward tells a social worker about the old “tea” incident and Jack, charged with child abuse, disappears. What binds and tears the couple apart is that Rachel is driven to cure Edward at whatever cost, while Jack is willing to pay that cost.
Though without easy or pat explanations, Bauer’s world is rich in the often wrong-headed but always well-meaning choices her characters, like real people, make daily. An impressive debut.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6949-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
